Freelancefolder

Earn More Money by Growing Your Freelancing Business

Posted February 23, 2010 in Business, Productivity

Do you need to earn more money?

At first, freelancers earn more money by taking on additional clients. However, there is a practical limit to how many clients a single freelancer, working alone, can handle. Eventually, a successful freelancer will be faced with more work than he or she can handle alone. That’s usually when the question of growing your freelance business comes up.

By growing the freelance business, I mean adding additional people to your business efforts so that you can handle additional work (and earn the additional income that goes along with it).

In this post, we’ll discuss the growth of your freelancing business. We’ll examine the best time for a freelancing business to grow and also take a look at several options for growth.

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5 Bad Work at Home Habits: Are You Guilty?

Posted February 9, 2010 in Lifestyle, Productivity

Isn’t working at home great? That’s why so many of us are either already doing it, or dreaming about doing it. We know it’s just the thing for creative types who don’t like structure and hierarchy. Working at home has its perks.

However, working at home also brings many temptations that can sabotage our productivity, creativity, sanity, happiness and even our health.

Below are what I consider to be the five most common pitfalls of working at home, why they’re bad for us, and how we can avoid or overcome them.

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10 Free Project Management Applications

Posted February 8, 2010 in Productivity, Tools/Resources

How do you make sure that you get all of your work done on time?

As freelancers, we wear many different hats. In addition to performing our freelancing specialty for the client, we’re also the sales staff, the manager, the support team, and the accountant all rolled into one person.

For many freelancers the project planning tasks that go along with freelancing may seem kind of overwhelming (especially if they’ve never done any project planning). Other freelancers may find that they need to provide the same kind of project plans to their clients that would have been required of them in the corporate world.

Either way, project planning can be a lot of extra work for a freelancer. The project planning task is difficult to handle without good tools to work with.

In this post, I list some project management tools that are either freeware or open source.

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Do You Recognize the Early Warning Signs of Freelancer Burnout?

Posted February 2, 2010 in Lifestyle, Productivity

You just love your job as a freelancer, but lately it seems like you really have to force yourself to get the work done. Perhaps you’re getting sick all the time–you always catch whatever illness seems to be going around. Maybe you don’t have any problems getting started on your projects, but seem to find yourself spending a lot of time on Facebook, or Twitter, or playing online games.

If you can relate to these problems, then you could be suffering from freelancer burnout.

If you’re suffering from freelancer burnout, it could be serious. Burnout, when not dealt with, can threaten your business, your relationships, and even your health.

In this post, we’ll discuss the reality of freelancer burnout and describe a few steps you can take to ensure that it doesn’t snuff out your freelancing career.

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Seven Free & Paid Tools to Help You Work Without Distractions

Posted January 21, 2010 in Productivity

If you freelance from home, you struggle with distractions all the time. It’s easy to give in to the lure of the TV, the seduction of the refrigerator and the enticement of your favorite videogame or book when you’re at home.

This is a problem, because a freelancer’s income is correlated with his productivity. The faster you can do your work, the more income you can earn. Therefore, it’s extremely important to develop the discipline of working without distractions.

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The 20 Best Productivity and Personal Development Blogs

Posted January 11, 2010 in Productivity

One of the things that many freelancers struggle with is that we find it hard to manage time. No matter how much we wish there were more hours in a day, the fact is that a day is only going to consist of 24 hours. If we can’t straighten our priorities, our productivity level and creativity isn’t going through shine through our work.

Having said good bye to 2009, it’s time to take control of our career and get things done, faster and more effectively. We’ve been creating lists of sites that we think will help freelancers learn more. We recently created a list of some of the top social media blogs and SEO related sites.

Today we are bringing you a list of some of the best productivity and personal development related blogs on the web.

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Productivity Tips for Freelancers with Toddlers Underfoot

Posted December 27, 2009 in Productivity

If you’re the freelancing parent of a young child, you’ll find that many productivity books are simply not applicable. They were probably written by either ultra-productive people without children, or those who are never expected to change a diaper during the daytime.

Advice like, “shut your home office door and focus on the task at hand,” is clearly not for the one who’s primarily responsible for the care of an infant, toddler or preschooler who needs constant attention 24/7.

Yet, you’re a professional who works at home. You do need to get stuff done, or else, how are you gonna make any money? Day care is not an option, because you chose to stay home so you could be with your child in the first place.

Boy do I know how you feel. I began freelancing when my youngest child was 20 months old. Since that time, I’ve discovered a number of things that help me squeeze a few hours of productive time per day. I still don’t work eight full hours a day (I know other freelancers work much longer hours), but I’m not tearing my hair out with frustration either.

In this post, we’ll give you some tips to help you become more productive.

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When and How to Draw the Line When Everything Is an “Emergency”

Posted December 23, 2009 in Managing Clients, Productivity

Clients usually turn to freelancers because they prefer a more ‘personal’ approach than agencies or larger organizations can offer. The relationships and sometimes even friendships that come from working closely with clients to bring their vision to life are always a satisfying element of my business. Unfortunately, the expectations that accompany the client’s desire for personal service can grow to nightmarish proportions if not managed correctly.

Every client wants to be treated as though they are your top priority. This isn’t unreasonable. Striving to help clients feel valued and even “special” will almost always benefit your business reputation and inspire authentic word-of-mouth recommendations. But, there are some clients that appear to ‘forget,’ or never realize in the first place, that theirs is not the only project being worked on. This can result in unreasonable and outrageous requests, unachievable deadlines, and intense emotions for all  parties involved.

Some clients fail to grasp that for a freelancer to successfully serve all of their clients their projects must be carefully balanced. For various reasons these clients operate under a mentality that everything on their agenda is an ‘emergency’ and that the freelancer they hired should treat it as such. Their constant emails, impatient phone calls, instant messages, and so forth, can result in a terrible experience for everyone.

In this post, we share some suggestions for dealing with those so-called client emergencies.

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Seven Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Outsource

Posted December 15, 2009 in Business, Productivity

Do you outsource?

Outsourcing is a business strategy that has been drummed into my brain by my mompreneur mastermind group, freelancing books like The Unlimited Freelancer, and various other posts on FreelanceFolder (such as this one). “You need to outsource if you want to become more profitable,” everybody says.

After months of hearing this — and after a catastrophic episode that involved accidentally making a blog explode into virtual smithereens — I finally decided to grow my team.

In this post, we’ll examine outsourcing. We’ll discuss what I’ve tried and we’ll look at seven critical questions that you should ask before you outsource.

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